Best Protection from Life’s Uncertainties before it’s too late
On one summer morning during the visit to my hometown in 2019, I was meeting my school friends for the breakfast at our regular place. We were just talking about our lives, family, and job and then one of the friends did a shocking revelation about the storm that he is dealing with in his life. His wife was diagnosed with cervical cancer and she is now in an advanced stage of cancer. This is a very complex type of cancer with very limited chances of recovery. She is undergoing painful chemotherapy and taking medications with heavy side effects for about 8 months.
Our friend burst into tears while explaining his own emotional and financial helplessness to take care of appropriate treatment for his wife. After prodding him for long, he opened to talk about his financial troubles where he had spent about 90% of his savings on treatment costs. This was not sufficient and hence he had taken an expensive personal loan to pay for some of the treatment costs. Even with all these challenges, my friend continued to provide emotional support to his only daughter while paying the bills. However, unfortunately, due to complications of cervical cancer, his wife and my friend lost their battle and she succumbed to death in 2020. My friend is now recovering from his loss and simultaneously struggling with repaying the huge debt he has amassed.
This incident shook me to then think about how I can create an impact to support millions of people suffering from similar or even severe challenges in their lives. I realized that the uncertainties in our lives are further getting complicated and extremely difficult to handle in a traditional way where you rely on your friends and families for support or at the best buy a term insurance plan to cover for death loss. The uncertainties in life could be driven by a critical illness like cancer, accidental disability, health issues possibly due to pandemics like Covid-19, and financial distress due to job loss or market crash. Most of these challenges cannot be resolved by simply saving, investing, or buying a term insurance plan. Therefore, life’s uncertainties can be taken care of by a portfolio of multiple insurance products with appropriate timing and size of the coverage.
This was the genesis of ProtectMeWell™ where we deployed our one and a half decades of experience of working in an Insurance industry in designing and managing various Insurance products.
ProtectMeWell™ gathers personal and financial profile details and provides the recommendation on the type of products, coverage size, and purchase timing of these products customized for everyone. This coverage considers your financial capacity to ensure that you can buy the coverage irrespective of your annual household income levels. This is a powerful tool that can change the way the insurance products are proposed and sold, which in many cases is a push selling. Insurance needs to be positioned as one of the essential expenses for the household, which will protect you in bad times and ensure that you have a comfortable lifestyle even after your retirement. Traditionally, Insurance is considered as a sunk cost, or Insurance is bought to take the benefit of tax deduction.
ProtectMeWell™ can enable the insurance and financial advisors to reinvigorate the power of having a portfolio of insurance products for their clients.
The intent here is to make this tool available to the masses through do-it-yourself, agents, brokers, and financial advisors modes. We must create this awareness in any common person who has anxiety to even think about buying an Insurance product.
This is when we decided to partner with Economic Times (ET®) to generate the awareness given the scale and reach of ET® to large and small urban areas. ET® wants to bring the value add services to its readers and ProtectMeWell™ wants to spread the word on ease of understanding the insurance needs and then potentially buying it. You can provide your personal and financial details without providing your identifiable data and get the recommendation along with a detailed recommendation report.
When we were developing ProtectMeWell™, the goal was to develop a non-intrusive (not utilizing personally identifiable data like government IDs, email-IDs), easy to use yet highly accurate. We also needed to offer the recommendation that is actionable given the availability of products and coverages in our target market (currently India). The recommendation is provided on term insurance, critical illness, and health insurance coverages along with the target amount that you need at retirement age for a comfortable retirement.
You can assess your current insurance coverage (you bought or through your employer) and then purchase the balance insurance coverage by approaching any agent, broker, or financial advisor, online or offline. In situations when you may not be able to buy complete coverage as per the recommendation, you need to build a short-term risk appetite until you buy the full coverage. We suggest you assess your insurance needs periodically or when there is a major life event so that you are closely monitoring your protection levels. It takes less than a minute!
In conclusion, our lives are getting increasingly challenging due to external factors that are not in our control and hence we should protect ourselves and our loved ones by securing an insurance coverage that is at an appropriate level. Personally, I would like to enjoy my life with my family without having to worry about these risks that can easily be managed by Insurance protection. So, pick up your gadget, answer simple questions, and know where do you stand on insurance coverage.
